South Texas jail inmate Fernando Padro, accused of stealing credit cards to buy diapers, a bike and other goods for his family, heard nothing about his case for nine months until he was charged with a misdemeanor and released in March 2023.
Over the next two years, he was arrested repeatedly and pressured into a seemingly improper plea deal in one court and charged again in another. Padron, 27, is a U.S. citizen with no prior conviction. His crime was minor enough that elsewhere in Texas, he might not have been jailed.
In the dysfunctional Maverick County court system, basic tenets of justice often do not apply. Poor defendants accused of minor crimes are rarely provided lawyers. People spend months behind bars without charges filed against them, much longer than state law allows. Last year, at least a dozen people were held too long uncharged after arrests for minor nonviolent crimes, reports the New York Times.
Some defendants are forgotten. Two men were released after the Times asked about them, half a year after their sentences had been completed.
“The county is not at the level that it should have been for years,” said Judge Ramsey English Cantú, who oversees misdemeanor court. He said he had been trying to “revamp” and “rebuild” the local justice system since he was elected in 2022.
Under the U.S. Constitution, people facing jail time are entitled to a lawyer — paid for by the government if they cannot afford their own — and a fair and efficient court process. These protections are tenuous, especially in rural areas. In Texas, one of the states that spend the least, on indigent defense, the newspaper found recent examples of people held beyond deadlines without charges or lawyers in six rural counties.
Defense lawyers and constitutional law scholars called the Maverick County’s practices “atrocious,” “Kafkaesque” and “not a criminal system at all.”